by Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY

by Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY

Jane Seymour, 61, starred as Solitaire in 1973's Live and Let Die. She shares:

I was very young. I didn't know anything about Bond at the time. I never imagined I'd be a Bond girl. They were looking for a virgin and I was a nicely brought-up girl from Wimbledon. I never really auditioned. I went in and met (producer) Harry Saltzman, and he hired me on the spot. He took me to Cubby's (producer Albert R. Broccoli) office. I was on television at the time. When they found me, they made me swear to secrecy for two weeks. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone around me that I got the part. People would ask how I did, and I had to do my best acting to pretend to everyone, including my parents, that I didn't get the part.

Roger Moore was lovely. I have lots of great memories from the shoot. Filming in Jamaica was exciting and exotic. The whole thing was fairly surreal. It was a very big deal at the time in England. They made a really big deal out of it. It was a very big deal in those days. It was a big film made in England. I remember the voodoo scenes. I was a dancer and got very excited about the voodoo dancing that went on. When I get carried in, when I'm held in the air, I thought that would be a fun thing to do.

I remember being at the premiere with the royal family. I saw my father beaming up at me. My parents were very excited. To this day, it's 'Oh, my God, she's a Bond girl.'

After that movie, I decided to go back into the theater and resume where I started off and do the classics. I played Ophelia and Lady Macbeth. At one point, people thought I was going backwards, but I thought it was very important to learn how to act. I wanted to be a serious actress rather than a pretty face. And that's pretty much what I did for the rest of my career. I avoided running three paces behind a man. I came to America and started doing lots of miniseries. Americans didn't seem to mind that I was in a Bond film.

It's interesting because a lot of my 16-year-old kids' friends know me from Wedding Crashers, and not so much Bond. My kids have a good laugh. I was 20 then. The look I had then was the look that a lot of their friends are assuming now. They think it's cool. What goes around comes around. When I auditioned for Wedding Crashers, the producers had never seen any of my other work except for Bond. I got Wedding Crashers partly because I was a Bond girl.

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